And this isn't going to win me any friends either.....

I hate Gisburn.

There. I've said it. I've tried and tried, and I've fallen off more on their blue than I have anywhere else. It's destroyed my confidence, left me hating mountain biking and generally I wish I'd never stepped out of the house this morning.

I appreciate trail grading is a subjective art. I appreciate Gisburn wouldn't exist at all without the love, hard work and attention of a very small and dedicated group of people and I have thanked them repeatedly for that - hell, at least they've bothered with a blue, many trails centres don't even grace us beginners with a nod, instead assuming we're all useless and at best providing us with a green route which involves nothing but fireroads.

Great for families, but not what I'd actually call 'mountain biking'.

Unfortunately, what I think is an appropriate trail to send someone down whose taste of 'mountain biking' has hitherto been nothing but fire roads and what other people feel is appropriate do not match. Or, rather they do not match when wet. And here, right here, we arrive at the fundamental problem with Gisburn in its entirety. It's in East Lancashire. It might be in the Forest of Bowland, that might make it sound quite upper class and fabulous, but frankly mate, it's East Lancs. Lets not get any airs and graces here. Actually, that's another thing but we'll get to that later.

It rains in East Lancs. It rains really rather a lot. So tell me, please do tell me why, we have a trail centre which is slippy as all hell and twice as treacherous, which is disintegrated a little more every time I ride it, in which erosion seems to be providing a never ending challenge to the trail builder, and which rain and wet seem to be the arch enemy both of the trail builders and the riders, in East Lancs?

I've read a lot of threads today on forums, discussing the relative merits or not of Gisburn. Wrong kind of soil, apparently. No flow. Some love it with a complete devotion but others call in on the way from the South to Scotland and end up coming away disappointed and frustrated. In the process of reading these posts, the penny dropped. It's me. It's not the trails. Okay, so the trails really are becoming looser and more eroded every time I ride across them, and in the wet I fall off at a different bit every time - there's no one hotspot, no one nemesis, my focus wanders off and 1/2 inch misjudgement turns into a painful slam into the most unforgiving mixture of sand and rock I've found yet. The mix of tight berms, little humps that as a blue route rider, I'm really not going to attempt jumping, the small rocks which are jutting out everywhere meaning a line, whichever one you pick is full of them, the bits falling off the track at the side, the punishment for 1/2 inch of misplacement meaning sliding off the track.....it's not somewhere to go and regain confidence. Actually it's not somewhere to go to gain confidence. The trail is slippy, the Northshore is slippy and the point where I found a route easier to ride in the snow than in the wet is the point where I just give up and go home. It's not fun. Mountain biking was supposed to be fun.

That's before we've even got to the proportion of 'interesting bits' to fireroad on the blue route. So, this is where I concede defeat. Gisburn is for techheads. People with way more skill than me. People way fitter than me. It is not for me. The reason I fell in love with mountain biking was the speed. Lacks finesse, yes, I know. Lacks challenge, well yes, I know. But nothing on earth, absolutely nothing on earth is better than swooping down switchbacks on beautifully compressed, properly compressed mud, finding your lines, pumping the dips which have been artfully placed with care and precision, railing around berms because you are confident in the trail builders by that point and know you're not going to be punished for commiting 100% to it. I can ride just about well enough to hammer down the side of Electric Blue. I don't jump the little jumps there either but somehow, it's less of an issue there, and it's less of an issue because of the trail quality, the substance of it, and knowing exactly where my wheels are and relying on their footprint to carry me through. I am not good enough to deal with disintegration and crumble on the other side, nor with the tight turns thrown in for fun.

I also know, absolutely know, that I am not alone. There are two camps developing in mountain biking - hell there may well have been two camps right from the start. Actually, no, make that three. There are the people who are comfy in Calderdale. There are the people who grin at Glentress and there are the brave people who stick to the countries bridleways and footpaths, piecing together routes themselves.

I'm a Glentress girl. It's where my heart is. It's where I don't have to throttle back. It's where the magic happens and I can do anything with my bike. I have absolutely nothing against the other camps, nothing at all. As soon as I am fit enough to dig and barrow I'll volunteer at Gisburn because it's important to, because it's local, because they need help, because I can help to build the beautiful shiny playgrounds for other people to play on even if I can't ride them, and it would be ignorant not to at least offer. But somewhere along the line, maybe way way way down the line, I can still dream that one day, there will be a little piece of track with the ethos of Glentress's blue routes built round the corner from me. Until that point, Llandegla is going to be getting an awful lot of my money because there I found a glimpse of the same ethos.

So, the next time someone asks why people love Llandegla, I'll be explaining this - people love Llandegla because it's the closer you can come to flying on wheels without the slog up the M6.